19 year old Irena Gut is promoted to housekeeper in the home of a highly respected Nazi officer in Poland when she finds out that the Jewish ghetto is about to be liquidated. Determined to help twelve Jewish workers, she decides to shelter them in the safest place she can think of – the basement of the German Major's house. Over the next eight months, Irena uses her wit, humour and immense courage to hide her friends as long as possible.

June 1941. Preparations for the wedding of a butcher’s son and a rabbi’s daughter are in full swing in a Jewish shtetl in the Lviv Region. The intrigue of this seemingly ordinary event is that Yuna – the bride – loves another man and he, Mendele… plans to kidnap her. At this very time, a Nazi death squad is approaching the shtetl.